With the completion of HPE OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets acquisition, SUSE has expanded its technical competence and capacity to play a bigger role in the cloud and datacentre space globallyPankaj Maru | ETCIO | April 17, 2017, 08:55 IST

This buyout makes SUSE far more competitive than in the past. “We acquired technical competence and also technical assets from HPE that covers OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, so that will put us into a more competitive position,” said Andy Jiang, Vice President – Asia Pacific & Japan, SUSE during a recent media briefing.

Advantage SUSE

Interestingly, it also helps SUSE to build a new image for itself that is more appealing to the enterprise customers. “Yes absolutely. I think by acquiring the HPE OpenStack and Cloud Foundry technical assets, we dramatically have expanded our overall capacity,” added Jiang.

Now SUSE is in a stronger position to leverage the tech legacy, talent and customers of HPE; and push itself in the enterprise segment which is increasingly relying on cloud today.

In fact, HPE has named SUSE as the preferred Open source Linux partner as well as for OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

“HPE actually has been engaging with lot of top tier enterprise customers and some of the government agencies. So right after the announcement was made, we got lot of inquiries and that does give us lot of competitive advantage,” informed Jiang.

Driving datacentres and cloud

Since most of cloud providers and datacentres today leverage Open source based technologies, that’s where the open source OS vendor is seeing a bigger advantage and opportunities.

And with OpenStack’s Infrastruture-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Cloud Foundry’s Platform –as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings both under SUSE’s control, certainly it has a bigger role both in cloud and datacentre space, where most large and mid-sizes enterprises are heavily investing today.

In fact, some of the top datacentre players in India including Pi Datacentres, Netmagic, CtrlS and Sify are offering services that are built on SUSE. Besides, BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange), IndianOil, Mahindra & Mahindra, BPCL and others on are among other large enterprise customers of SUSE.

“I think, we are covering all three (private, public and hybrid clouds) but I would say that our software offering is focusing on private cloud. However, I think some of the key clients probably want to build capability not just for private but hybrid as well,” Jiang pointed out about SUSE’s strategy on cloud.

With large enterprises and mid-size organizations preferring private over public clouds mainly for better controls, compliance and security needs. And that’s why SUSE is focusing on the private cloud.

SUSE in India

In terms of SUSE’s growth plan in India, company wants to increase its headcounts.

“We are around 10 people and may be, will be tripling our sales team in the next financial year (May – April fiscal). Next year our comprehensive coverage model will be engaging more with partners and customers,” said Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head – SUSE.

In India, SUSE largely focuses on key four verticals including BFSI, Telecom, Manufacturing and Government. In terms of verticals, SUSE is very optimistic about the India’s government sector with mega projects like Digital India and SmartCities that are using Open source technologies.

According to Bhattacharyya, SUSE is fully aligned with Indian government’s Digital India and other programs which are leveraging Open source extensively.

He said that SUSE is very strong in the mission critical application space and informed that another key market that is going to open up in India is supercomputing market.

Citing Indian government prediction, Bhattacharyya informed that by 2022 India is supposed to have 55 super computers. “Today, we have only 5 and that’s a huge jump,” he emphasized.

Expanding the market reach

From growth perspective, the HPE OpenStack buyout is also very significant for SUSE to penetrate the Indian market. It can bring onboard HPE’s partners and large system integrators like TCS, Wipro and others to tap more opportunities in India.

“HPE will give us a reach into uncharted territories in remote locations in terms of distribution and channel network, which will give us more fire power,” commented Bhattacharyya.

In addition, SUSE can also leverage its parent company Micro Focus in India, which has a huge presence here. Under a pact in 2014, the Attachmate Group agreed to merge its four software brands SUSE, Attachmate, NetIQ and Novell with Micros Focus International.

“Definitely, there will be cross leveraging. And that’s definitely going to help us in terms of spreading to lot of uncharted territories, where they are already present. That will be a big boost for us,” concluded Bhattacharyya.

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